Reactions to the Kelvinverse Enterprise

Y'know, a lot of people probably don't remember this (I wasn't a member of this forum at the time, so I'm not sure how you guys handled it) but there was a LOT of negative reaction to the new USS Enterprise NCC-1701 as she appeared in the 2009 Star Trek. My question is: why? Was it that the new design was percieved to be a poorly crafted design? Was it because it was new, and "people can be frightened of change"? Or was the design picked on specifically due to the association with a movie that so many people reject as being too "Star wars-y"?

DISCLAIMER: It's not my favorite Enterprise, but the 2009 design isn't a bad ship by any stretch IMO. I LOVED both Star Trek 2009 AND Into Darkness, so there's also that possibility that I don't mind the design so much because I associate it with the movie(s) that dawned a shining new era of Star Trek, which I was eager to be a part of.

The shape of the secondary hill and the nacelles, the bridge design, engineering, it just doesn't work for me.

In the interests of full disclosure, I don't really like the Kelvinverse movies anyway, but the first one was O.K. - they got worse as they went on (imho). I suppose not liking the ship was partly to blame.

Y'know, a lot of people probably don't remember this (I wasn't a member of this forum at the time, so I'm not sure how you guys handled it) but there was a LOT of negative reaction to the new USS Enterprise NCC-1701 as she appeared in the 2009 Star Trek. My question is: why? Was it that the new design was percieved to be a poorly crafted design? Was it because it was new, and "people can be frightened of change"? Or was the design picked on specifically due to the association with a movie that so many people reject as being too "Star wars-y"?

DISCLAIMER: It's not my favorite Enterprise, but the 2009 design isn't a bad ship by any stretch IMO. I LOVED both Star Trek 2009 AND Into Darkness, so there's also that possibility that I don't mind the design so much because I associate it with the movie(s) that dawned a shining new era of Star Trek, which I was eager to be a part of.

Aside from the January 2009 teaser trailer and the set of promo posters from Comic-Con in July, the first official picture release of anything from the film was that image of the Enterprise in an early-November 2008 article in Entertainment Weekly.

There were a LOT of reactions — some of them very angry, and not a few of which involved detailed plans for "fixing" the design so that it would be "right" (according to some notion that starship proportions, positioning of pylons, saucer and engineering hull dimensions, nacelle size and shape, etc. MUST always be JUST SO, and that any deviation from said formula was so "wrong" that it constituted an offense against the entire Universe and everything in it.*)

I don't know. I'm not an expert in Starfleet Ship Design Theory, but I quite liked this one. It actually looked like something which belonged in deep space.

* Not much of an exaggeration; some folks really did take it that seriously.

That was my reaction in 2009. All things considered, the movie told a unique tale, in the Star Trek universe. It seems to me we were nitpicking.

As time moves forward, and Abrams referred to the Enterprise as a character, it was a bland, and abused one. The hull cracks in '09, the ship would've crashed in '12 if Kirk hadn't died, and it was trashed in '16 for the A. We never knew the interiors, bonded with the vessel, through missions, time. They didn't build this character, showing the passage of time, nor refer somehow, to its history. The vessel, although the A, was used to sell Star Trek VI as the home of the final adventure of the crew we first grew to know in 1966 (it was 1991). The final images are the first, Spock and Kirk playing chess, and a two-shot from the most recent film, The Final Frontier.

I felt no history in the newest movies. It was something to destroy, that's about it. I had no reaction when the ship crashed on the planet. The way? Inventive. Bees.

But, I cared little for this ship. The same force that called it a terrible design is the same force that called it a character--sentimentality over the original TOS run, which permeated these movies, after '09, through gratuitous overuse of Leonard Nimoy, character moments and plot devices from the series, lines of dialogue ripped away from other films. And never challenging these two movies to do anything fresh, and new.

Love notes. Greatest hits. And they managed to nitpick even the love notes. I guess they wanted the original 11-foot model at the Smithsonian to be restored, and shot on green screen.

That was my reaction in 2009. All things considered, the movie told a unique tale, in the Star Trek universe. It seems to me we were nitpicking.

As time moves forward, and Abrams referred to the Enterprise as a character, it was a bland, and abused one. The hull cracks in '09, the ship would've crashed in '12 if Kirk hadn't died, and it was trashed in '16 for the A. We never knew the interiors, bonded with the vessel, through missions, time. They didn't build this character, showing the passage of time, nor refer somehow, to its history. The vessel, although the A, was used to sell Star Trek VI as the home of the final adventure of the crew we first grew to know in 1966 (it was 1991). The final images are the first, Spock and Kirk playing chess, and a two-shot from the most recent film, The Final Frontier.

I felt no history in the newest movies. It was something to destroy, that's about it. I had no reaction when the ship crashed on the planet. The way? Inventive. Bees.

But, I cared little for this ship. The same force that called it a terrible design is the same force that called it a character--sentimentality over the original TOS run, which permeated these movies, after '09, through gratuitous overuse of Leonard Nimoy, character moments and plot devices from the series, lines of dialogue ripped away from other films. And never challenging these two movies to do anything fresh, and new.

Love notes. Greatest hits. And they managed to nitpick even the love notes. I guess they wanted the original 11-foot model at the Smithsonian to be restored, and shot on green screen.

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Well, I enjoyed all three, for different reasons. I'll agree with you on the point that the enterprise got it's arse handed to it a little too much, but I still think the scene in beyond where kirk sees the dish go down is absolutely epic and one of the best scenes in the movie. The score is amazing in that scene and the visuals are very good too.

It's never going to get to the bond the prime TOS crew had with the ship but it's unfair to expect it to isn't it?

Well, I enjoyed all three, for different reasons. I'll agree with you on the point that the enterprise got it's arse handed to it a little too much, but I still think the scene in beyond where kirk sees the dish go down is absolutely epic and one of the best scenes in the movie. The score is amazing in that scene and the visuals are very good too.

It's never going to get to the bond the prime TOS crew had with the ship but it's unfair to expect it to isn't it?

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Yes, it's unfair. They had 25 years of adventures, 6 movies and 80 episodes. Then

A.) Don't blow it to pieces every movie. It hasn't been earned.
B.) Don't refer to it as a character. It hasn't been earned.

I contend that if Sulu was with Kirk instead of Chekov, they could've summarized what Kirk learned about command after Pike's death, and during the three-year missions. Then, upon re-watch, we see Kirk mourn the Enterprise, and it becomes more of a character. It is the moment, despite what he has learned about command and work he put into becoming a great Captain, that he fails. Like the jump that ultimately led to Vulcan's destruction and the fact he needed Chekov to save him and Sulu. He feels like a failure, not quite his father. While on the subject, he would be able to talk to a fellow Starfleet command officer about being a father. Because, Kirk has a hard time accepting his father's death, and Sulu faced death several times, Demora in the front of my mind, when he almost died, on the Enterprise, and Kirk saves his life. So, George can speak to Kirk through Sulu. Better film?

This needed to be treated as a trope to strand the crew, and get character moments, interactions. This then grows the bond, and let a big bad come around in 4. Like "Disaster," only on the big screen.

As they did it, Chekov has one question for Kirk: "when did you know she lied?" And Kirk's journey is not to accept he is great and a failure, but to even Grant the premise he should be in Starfleet!

Unpopular opinion time: The TMP refit was a big design WTF for me, from the first time I saw it in 1979. Beautifully photographed? Yes, it certainly was, but it's a version of the ship I've never considered attractive.

The 2009 Enterprise, on the other hand — took me all of about five seconds to decide I liked it.

My favorite Enterprise is still the Refit/1701-A from TMP to TUC.
The Kelvin Enterprise 1701 I was indifferent to in 2009, but it was it's appearance in Into Darkness that made me like it almost as much as TMP Refit. I guess it was the use of the Enterprise in Into Darkness that defined it for me to like.

I wasn't too keen on the redesign during the 2009 movie, though it grew on me pretty fast. The thing that gets me has always been the vast increase in size, but my own headcannon is that it's not much bigger than the TOS/TMP-era ship, rather than being bigger than the Enterprise-D.

I love the Kelvinverse movies, but almost none of the production design elements. I think they missed the mark big time on that aspect.

I didn't hate the new Enterprise design (I'm not one of those fans who loses their fucking minds over things like this. Life is far too short), but it just felt uninspired and generic to me. It's immediately forgettable, and doesn't have any style or grace that the other versions have.

Wow, that was some fun nostalgia. I love that people were already onto the bigger size and complaining 8 months before the movie's release

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I'm not going to hunt through that thread to see if I mentioned it there, but I still remember being pretty sure that the teaser-trailer version of the ship wasn't representative of the real design and had been cheated for the shots they used. Boy, was I wrong. Nacelles big enough you could play a soccer game between the fins, and them being hunched up so close to the centerline, which I was sure was a cheat so they could see them both flanking the bridge in the closing shot, all aspects of the final design.

I will say my only major issue with the design is the way the nacelles are "shrugging." If they split off wider, the ship would look a lot more balanced from above. The silhouette is pretty much perfect from the sides, though, and manages to evoke the TOS version of the ship in a way none of the other takes on the "starship-class" concept have (including and especially the DSC version). There's a great example in ST09 during the Vulcan sequence, where there's a really wide shot of the Narada and the Enterprise, and at that distance it very much fuzzes into being the TOS ship.

I liked it at first, loved it in action and am on the fence as to whether I prefer the original '09/ID version or the slimmed-down Beyond one.

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The BEY version looks amazing in the movie, but that's because there's a really interesting interplay between the way they shot it from the front and back using really wide angle lenses. It's almost as if the ship itself was designed in forced-perspective to appear sleeker looking down the long axis, but, like any piece of forced-perspective, it looks super-weird from the sides. I go back and forth on the extra saucer windows, and I'm not a fan of stubbifying the neck or the downscaled nacelles, but I do like the semi-swept-back pylons (and the supersized impulse engine, but that's technically as STID thing). It'd be interesting to have a mix-and-match setup where you could swap out the modified pieces between ST09 and BEY a la carte.